Frühmittelalterliche Studien is considered by the editors as a forum of comprehensive medieval studies. The yearbook is intended to help to overcome the division of adiverse tradition, which bears witness to the same inseparable contextsexpressed in different ways, into conventional specialist fields of work of a conventional subject classification. Whilst maintaining the viewpoints of each specialist subject, a synthesis brings together disciplines which deal with traditional cultural groups or study closely related phenomena which can only be understood in a broader context. This is why the Frühmittelalterliche Studien attaches great importance to contributions that place a specificproblem or perspective in a broad context.